SKIP BREAK­FAST TO LEAN UP FASTER

Miss break­fast and go jog­ging for an hour in the morn­ing. The calo­ries you miss out on at break­fast you won’t con­sume later in the day. On the con­trary: as a re­sult of the com­bi­na­tion of phys­i­cal ex­er­tion and miss­ing break­fast you’ll con­sume less through­out the day than you would have if you had eaten break­fast. Amer­i­can sports sci­en­tist Jes­sica Bach­man, of the Univer­sity of Scran­ton, wrote about this in the Jour­nal of Nu­tri­tion and Me­tab­o­lism.

Study

The re­searchers per­formed an ex­per­i­ment with 12 male run­ners, aged 18­30, who they got to run on two sep­a­rate oc­ca­sions on a tread­mill in the morn­ing for 60 min­utes at 60 per­cent of their max­i­mal oxy­gen up­take. If you’re fit that’s the in­ten­sity at which you can just con­tinue a con­ver­sa­tion and at which your fat burn­ing is op­ti­mal. On one oc­ca­sion the par­tic­i­pants ate break­fast be­fore run­ning and on the other they skipped break­fast. The re­searchers also mea­sured the amount of food that the par­tic­i­pants ate on the days that they ran.

Re­sults

When the par­tic­i­pants skipped break­fast they did not make up for the missed calo­ries later in the day. What’s more: they even ate less after lunch than they did when they had had break­fast. The par­tic­i­pants burned an av­er­age of 900 kilo­calo­ries while run­ning. It made no dif­fer­ence whether they had eaten break­fast or not. But the par­tic­i­pants who had not had break­fast burned sig­nif­i­cantly more fat when run­ning.

Con­clu­sion

“With a grow­ing in­ter­est in exercising in a state of re­duced car­bo­hy­drate avail­abil­ity ­ ‘ train­ing low’ ­ it is im­por­tant to dis­cover the ef­fects these pro­to­cols may have on a va­ri­ety of phys­i­o­logic mark­ers,” the re­searchers wrote. “Pre­vi­ous re­search on train­ing low has found some ben­e­fi­cial im­prove­ments in mark­ers that could po­ten­tially lead to im­prove­ments in ath­letic per­for­mance.”

“The com­bi­na­tion of skip­ping break­fast and exercising in the fasted state may have an ad­di­tive ef­fect on sup­press­ing en­ergy in­take hours after ex­er­cise is com­pleted. It is cur­rently un­known if fol­low­ing this type of pro­to­col over a pro­longed pe­riod of time could have im­pli­ca­tions for weight man­age­ment.”